eBlackCU: A Collaborative Portal on African American Experiences in Champaign-Urbana is a project funded by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and administered by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UIUC.
The goals of eBlackCU are to: 1) Centralize information on local African-American history and culture and create new knowledge through this centralization; 2) Collaborate with past and present community residents in the production of knowledge by soliciting their contributions, both in the form of personal memories and in the form of digitized personal archives; 3) Contribute to a community of scholars, activists and citizens interested in learning more about various aspects of local African-American history and culture; and 4) Work towards the development the best-practices to scale this project up to the state-level in the implementation of eBlackIllinois: A Comprehensive Database on the Black Experience in Illinois.